Apart from steel alloys, aluminium and its alloys
represent the most used and attractive structural metallic materials
due to their specific properties such as low weight, low energy
cost of remelting, and the possibilty of almost complete recycling.
Therefore, these materials represent a major axis of the energy
transition [1]}. An intimate understanding of its
condensed phase properties is founded upon a description of the
atomic level structure and dynamics, and requires an accurate
representation of chemical bonding [2]}. This is of
utmost importance in order to tackle phenomena such as phase changes
and solidification process during which a liquid morphs into a solid
either by crystallization or amorphization [3]}, [4]},
showing eventually a change in electronic structure as a
metal-to-semiconductor transition [5]}, [6]}. First
principles approaches, essentially through the Density Functional
Theory (DFT) [7]}, [8]}, represent the dedicated
framework especially with the breakthrough provided by ab
initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations [9]} in
combining atomic dynamics with DFT. Despite its enormous success
in many complex chemical bonding environments [2]},
DFT implementations are limited to a few hundred atoms over time
scales less than 1 ns [11]}, [12]} on actual
large-scale supercompuing facilities, impeding its use for phenomena
at length and time scales typical of solidification [13]}.
